While Raban was flustered, pondering “how can I make this a draw,” Inian realized what Charles had in mind.
“That man’s character is a little below the average black mage’s.”
“Huh?”
It was a simple diagram. Given the two premises that Magi Black was Na Ihyeon, and that Charles was a black mage, anyone could have figured it out.
“If Charles, too, had his eye on Na Ihyeon as a sacrifice, would he not naturally be aiming to deepen her negative thoughts?”
Structurally, it was the same as what Raban had prepared in order to harvest Na Ihyeon’s negative thoughts. Maximizing the accumulation of negative thoughts by maintaining her social isolation.
The reason Charles was targeting Magi White was likely the same. To kill Magi White, Na Ihyeon’s closest friend.
“No, how could he do such a thing!”
Raban was indignant.
“…Are your eardrums broken? It is essentially the same as what we were going to do.”
“Hoo, I was trying to properly manage her social isolation for a sustainable supply of negative thoughts. But the change Charles will bring about is irreversible. Ah, a black mage with so little interest in preserving the negative-thought environment! The future of Hikarius’s black-mage world is dark!”
Having been forced to listen to such excessive nonsense, Inian wanted to wash out her ears.
But Raban was sincere.
“He’s like the very incarnation of pulling up the ladder behind him. If you eliminate the only social connection she has ever experienced, her negative thoughts may skyrocket in the short term, but in the long term she will inevitably shut her heart away, reducing the total supply of negative thoughts….”
“What nonsense are you spouting? You never had enough social influence to induce another person’s social isolation.”
“I was the one it happened to! Because of you!”
Raban, who had drifted into the Demon Realm, had once had a friend. A friend named Wilson, whose face he had drawn in blood on a round shard of stone.
The one who had destroyed that sole friend was that atrocious Demon Realm commoner, so the ill-fated bond between the two was truly deep.
“Khk, this is why people who have things are the worst. Remember Wilson…!”
“I really am going to lose my mind.”
Inian remembered Wilson.
Because Raban had used that lump of stone as a catalyst to synthesize a golem, then dressed it in his own robe and used it as bait.
There was no end to humoring his nonsense.
“So, what do you plan to do now?”
Inian urged the black mage to choose. If they had to deal with an unexpected situation on the fly, there was no better option than Raban’s madness.
***
At the western edge of Hikarius, where Magi White arrived, there was an industrial complex.
An abandoned industrial complex.
The empty industrial complex was, among Hikarius’s closed facilities, one of the rare places that had little connection to Naju Pharmaceuticals. It had happened after the Ivory Tower’s movements began in earnest.
“Productivity is hitting rock bottom because we have to evacuate whenever a monster appears, you know?”
“When do you think they’ll be exterminated?”
“Mm, according to the Evilping appearance statistics provided by Hikarius City Hall, it’ll take at least twelve weeks, and depending on the circumstances, easily sixty.”
The factory owners tapped at their calculators. The cost of relocating the factories, and the potential losses they would suffer if they continued production in Hikarius.
Their scales tipped toward relocating the factories. This was thanks to the guardian fairies secretly taking action to create Hikarius’s combat environment.
Among the guardian fairies’ preliminary measures was a subsidy for relocating factories damaged by monsters.
Publicly, the entity administering this subsidy was the Chalsu Foundation.
“…That must be why they stopped Papirun from going out personally.”
Since the Chalsu Foundation’s hand had reached this place, there was no telling what traps might have been prepared in the abandoned industrial complex. Magi White prepared the purification magic circle she had previously used to drive away the Blood Vessel Human.
Letters made of mana were engraved into her ribbons, and she wrapped those ribbons around both arms and hands.
It looked similar to the bandages a boxer wrapped around their fists.
Tap. Magi White’s form leapt lightly and landed in the center of the abandoned industrial complex.
Looking around, Magi White shouted with all her might.
“We kept our promise! You keep yours!”
Squirm.
The shadows moved.
Squirm.
The ground heaved.
Squirm.
The factory frames rattled.
The earth opened its maw.
Magi White’s response was reflexive. She extended the ribbon coiled around her fist, wrapped it around a chimney that no longer emitted smoke, and snapped it off. Following her left hand as she swung it with all her might, the spire-like chimney swept through the surroundings, leaving a linear trail of destruction.
Rumble!
In an instant, four buildings around Magi White collapsed. The teeth inside the maw the earth had opened crumpled, and concrete debris poured into its throat.
Using the falling wreckage as both shield and foothold, Magi White leapt.
As if chasing after her, a shadow rose. The enormous maw etched into the ground expanded, digesting the gray landslide.
The factories that had collapsed under the magical girl’s violence began moving on their own despite no one touching them, using rebar as bones and concrete as flesh to assemble gigantic arms. Bending fingers at angles not permitted to humans and extending their joints, they pursued the magical girl.
***
Watching the industrial complex from a short distance away, Raban was astonished. To do something like that with pure physical force.
“Yes, sufficiently advanced physical force is indistinguishable from magic.”
Raban tried to make sense of the bizarre phenomenon unfolding before him.
“…Even so. Hikarius isn’t the Demon Realm, where the air is half mana. Does it make sense to waste mana like that?”
The trajectory Magi White traced was clearly visible. Even though, judging by the sharp booms piercing his ears, her speed should already have surpassed the realm of sound.
Raban himself had not used some secret art of bodily modification to upgrade his eyeballs on the spot. It was simply because the mana condensed in Magi White’s body had exceeded a certain threshold, leaving light behind like an afterimage.
“Do we even need to help?”
“Cut the crap.”
Inian ignored the black mage whining, “I’m the only one without mana, the magical girls have mana, the Ochanja have mana, everyone has mana but me,” and looked around.
Because the ones driving Magi White into a corner right now were not black mages. They were all merely Ochanja, Charles’s familiars. Charles was certainly lying in ambush somewhere nearby as well, even if he could not be seen right now.
When would the black mage personally intervene? Maintaining her guard, Inian calculated their forces.
“How many are there?”
“Ochanja? Two. One that handles inorganic matter, including the factories. Something like that. One maw embedded in the shadows. Hm, the amount of mana itself is considerable for both of them. But they lack the mobility to land a decisive blow on a magical girl.”
Raban accurately grasped the Ochanja’s capabilities.
The shadow maw was connected to a bottomless other dimension and could swallow anything, while the factory parasite that had made gigantic arms out of reinforced concrete could produce destruction that in no way lagged behind the devastation Magi White had caused by swinging the chimney.
But the difference in speed was obvious. The source of the magical girl’s mobility was that endless mana. The propulsive force gained by exploding mana ignored things like inertia, allowing absurd movements such as right-angle turns in midair.
If this became a prolonged battle, the magical girl would win.
“The purification formula is too fatal to the Ochanja. All the enemy’s attacks miss, while her attacks hit as defense-ignoring true damage. No conscience, really. No conscience.”
The ribbons Magi White scattered like a spiderweb boasted a terrifying offensive power that evaporated any part of an Ochanja they touched.
Because the contact area itself was small, the Ochanja regenerated immediately, but the mascot’s combat machine instantly grasped the cutting power of her weapon and showed how to apply it.
She crossed the long-extended ribbons and swung them like scissors. The ribbons approaching on a diagonal had been extended enough to cut the factory parasite and the shadow maw in half and kill them.
And at that very moment.
Magi White stopped.
“Huh?”
Raban let out a short exclamation that might have been admiration or lament.
There was no natural fall according to the laws of physics, nor even the slightest twitch of a fingertip. Raban’s gaze turned toward the sky.
Even the clouds had stopped. Like a photograph taken at the instant Magi White was about to attack, all movement within an invisible frame had ceased.
The Ochanja were no exception. Even the mana that should have been circulating inside their bodies had been nailed in place.
Then, crunch.
From outside the frame to within it, into a world where even the wind had hardened, there came a single set of footsteps approaching alone. Something like black smoke gathered and formed a shape, then walked through the air toward Magi White.
“He’s here.”
Raban smiled. One question that had left him feeling uneasy had been answered.
The Charles detection formula he had prepared using Na Ihyeon’s hair as a catalyst had been pointing to that industrial complex all along, but Raban had not been able to observe Charles.
No matter how exquisitely he had crafted his concealment formula, evading the eyes of both a great demon and a black mage was clearly strange.
But now, from the magic that had paralyzed space itself and the bizarre entrance of smoke gathering together to appear, Raban understood Charles’s method.
“He reduced himself to something close to mana, down to the particle level. Using himself, spread throughout the entire space, as a catalyst, he paralyzed the area, and while leaving enough particles to maintain the spatial paralysis, he condensed a portion to construct a body.”
It was quite an interesting spell. Was this Hikarius’s own unique black magic? Raban was frankly impressed by magic that had been improved to let him maintain his sense of self even while disassembling himself to such an extent.
“Why did he have to divide himself so finely, to such an extreme degree?”
After pondering, Raban realized the answer without much difficulty. It was the same intention as when he had disassembled his familiar down to the blood-vessel level. A trick to maintain the total amount of mana while reducing the mana per individual entity so as not to draw the eye of an excessively powerful opponent—in other words, the Mother Fairy.
“How very interesting….”
The black mage’s eyes sparkled.
Because a free soup kitchen of nutritious black mana had opened, smoothly broken down like porridge and easy to digest.